The Vault

A severed hand arrives on the desk of Peter Diamond. He is unexcited. These are old bones from a vault below Bath Abbey Churchyard. But a monstrous mystery with antique connections is beginning.

The vault was once part of the house where Frankenstein was written. And the hand is not mediaeval, as everyone assumed. It dates from the 1980s, when the underground extension to the Roman Baths was constructed. The police inquiry is complicated by a visiting American professor, Joe Dougan, obsessed by Frankenstein and Mary Shelley. When the professor’s wife goes missing, Diamond cannot ignore him.